Lakeland Electric advisory board seeks 2

Saturday

LAKELAND — The city will make an effort to find two volunteers to bring the total membership of the Lakeland Utility Committee to a lucky 13, City Manager Tony Delgado said.

The city is seeking one residential customer that lives in Lakeland and one that lives outside Lakeland in Lakeland Electric's service territory to serve in the group that acts as an advisory body for the City Commission on Lakeland Electric matters.

In recent years, the advisory committee's population has peaked at 11, and recently commissioners told city administrators they are OK with rewriting the organizing ordinance to turn practice into law.

But that support faded during a discussion Friday at a City Commission agenda work session as Commissioner Justin Troller not only pushed back against the change, but urged city staff and his colleagues on the commission to push for the full baker's dozen.

Troller said he was surprised to find out the board could contain 13 members, and said he thought there was "an ulterior motive" to reducing the number of members.

"If we're short two folks, we need to put two folks on there," he said.

Troller said the two empty board seats, intended to represent one Lakeland residential customer and one out-of-city residential customer, need to be filled to represent both its largest rate class and the majority of Lakeland Electric customers that live outside city limits.

The advisory board grew out of scandal when a wholesale power contract that failed to account for rising natural gas prices ended up costing Lakeland Electric close to $100 million between 2000 and 2007.

The utility committee had begun as other small, commissioner-only workgroups that deal with niche issues like real estate dealings, board appointments and state legislative affairs. In 2004, the City Commission expanded the committee to include the seven commissioners and six members of the public, each from different sectors of the customer base.

It was expanded in 2005 with the addition of two more residential customers to the board, bringing the total to 13.

The committee remains advisory in nature, and elected commissioners tend to dominate discussions. But in 2015 and 2016, appointed member Daryl Johnson led a brief and successful charge to have budgetary and financial issues brought to the committee during the annual planning season.

Commissioner Don Selvage said before he was a commissioner he watched the last 13-member Utility Committee deal with the topic of fuel hedging, a fuel-buying strategy that is intended to act as an insurance policy against price spikes. It is controversial because achieving price stability often means slightly higher average fuel costs.

But as the discussion continued, Selvage said Troller's arguments about representation to residential customers and out-of-city customers changed his mind. A majority of commissioners agreed not to go forward with the board contraction.

"When in doubt, go for more transparency, more engagement," Selvage said.

Commissioners joked that Troller, who as a commissioner has been the one most likely to be on the losing end of a 6-to-1 vote, managed to pull a reverse Casey at Bat.

"I would like to note for posterity that Troller won one," Malless said, making the date.

"It only took me 10 years and about 400 meetings to get it," Troller said.

Christopher Guinn can be reached at Christopher.Guinn@theledger.com or 863-802-7592. Follow him on Twitter @CGuinnNews.

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